Olmert's Border Plan Triggers An Uproar

March 11, 2006|By Laura King Los Angeles Times

JERUSALEM — With Israeli elections less than three weeks away, a furor erupted Friday over acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's declaration that in the next four years Israel would draw its own borders, roughly following the route of a separation barrier being built in the West Bank.

Both right-wing and left-wing opponents expressed outrage over Olmert's plan, spelled out in interviews that appeared Friday in major Israeli newspapers. The fate of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, home to about a quarter million Israelis, is a major issue in the campaign leading up to the March 28 elections. Olmert's centrist Kadima party leads each of his opponents, the right-leaning Likud and the dovish Labor, by about a 2-1 margin.

Olmert, who assumed the national leadership after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was incapacitated by a massive stroke on Jan. 4, has said previously that Israel will maintain its grip on some of the largest West Bank settlement blocs that lie close to the "Green Line," the armistice boundary at the end of the 1967 Middle East War.

But in the interviews, he laid out his most detailed scenario yet of Israel's plans for the West Bank. Under it, some existing Jewish settlements would be uprooted and the separation barrier would be moved to incorporate others.

"We will adjust the [barrier's] route either to the east or the west in accordance with internal Israeli agreement," Olmert told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper. "The fence will be the border line that will separate Israel and the Palestinians."

Speaking to the Maariv daily, he added: "At the end of this process, we will achieve a complete separation from the vast majority of the Palestinian population."

In general, Israeli leftists oppose unilateral measures because they believe the border should be set through negotiations with the Palestinians. And Olmert's right-wing opponents believe Israel should not cede territory without some concessions from the Palestinians.

Uzi Landau of the Likud party said the Olmert plan, with pullbacks from large swaths of the West Bank, would not provide Israel with sufficient protection against Hamas, the Islamist extremist group that won Palestinian parliamentary elections in January. Speaking on Israel Radio, he likened such a plan to "letting a little kid play with matches."

Yossi Beilin, who heads the left-leaning Meretz-Yahad party, also criticized Olmert -- but because his plan called for Israeli construction in a corridor between mainly Palestinian east Jerusalem and the West Bank's largest Jewish settlement, Maale Adumim.

Beilin, an architect of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, told Israel Radio that such a course of action "is essentially preventing a permanent Israeli-Palestinian accord."

Olmert, the ex-mayor of Jerusalem, also appeared to be preparing the Israeli electorate for the possibility of ceding largely Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem to the Palestinians. In several interviews, he said he did not understand why Israelis should seek to maintain a connection to Shufat, a Palestinian refugee camp that lies within the municipal boundaries. Under Olmert's leadership, Kadima maintains a wide support in comparison to rival parties, according to public opinion polls. But that margin has been eroding somewhat in recent weeks.

A poll published Friday in The Jerusalem Post forecast that Kadima would win 35 seats in the 120-member Knesset, or parliament -- down from a high of about 45 seats in polls immediately after Sharon was stricken on Jan. 4.